China Feels the Heat

But precisely because Beijing is determined to hold a picture-perfect Olympics, the government has declared war on anyone who might pose a problem. The targets are not all as distant as Uighurs and Tibetans; last week a Beijing court sentenced 34-year-old activist Hu Jia to three and a half years in prison on charges of "inciting subversion of state power." If anything, the barring of foreign observers and media from Hu's trial suggests legal proceedings are becoming even "less transparent and more opaque" than before, says Kamm. His San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation anticipates that the number of political prisoners in China this year will exceed last year's count (742) because of an expected influx of Tibetan inmates and cyberdissidents.

Each new protest inspires others. Trouble broke out in Lhasa on March 10, the anniversary of a failed 1959 Tibetan revolt, and the unrest worsened when authorities began locking down the city's monasteries. Even after troops quelled the violence in the Tibetan capital, eruptions continued in surrounding provinces until at least April 3. Exiled Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer says members of her ethnic group in the far western province of Xinjiang were inspired by the Tibetans—and angered by a pre-emptive curfew that was imposed to keep Uighurs from repeating the Lhasa blowup. She claims that up to 1,000 women were involved in the Hetian protest, demanding the lifting of a ban on wearing headscarves.

Before Tibet erupted, Beijing was doing a comparatively smooth job of handling international criticism. The primary issue for Olympic protests was China's refusal to lean harder on its friends in Khartoum for an end to Sudan's government-backed ethnic cleansing in Darfur. When Steven Spielberg quit as a creative adviser to the Games in February over the Darfur issue, Beijing handled the decision with relative equanimity. As recently as March 7 the government made its special envoy to Darfur available for a meeting with Olympic sponsors.

But the question of Tibet, or indeed any of China's restive minority regions, touches upon Beijing's worst fears of national dissolution. At a March 2 concert in Shanghai, Icelandic singer Björk startled her audience by ending her last song, "Declare Independence," with shouts of "Tibet! Tibet!" After that incident, Chinese apparatchiks "started freaking out," says one Beijing-based diplomat, who was not cleared to speak on the record. All sorts of creative projects involving foreigners suddenly had to be approved by China's cabinet.

Since the Lhasa protests, foreign ambassadors in Beijing have been summoned to the Foreign Ministry at all hours—even on Easter Sunday. They've been lectured on China's version of events; shown a lengthy video on a March 14 "beating, looting, smashing and burning incident"; berated when their government leaders back home have mentioned the possibility of an Olympic boycott, and pressured to make public statements of support for China's "restrained" response to the Tibetan riots. India's ambassador, Nirupama Rao, had to throw on her clothes, find an embassy driver and trundle over to the Foreign Ministry at 2 o'clock one morning to hear Chinese security concerns after Tibetan protesters breached the wall at the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi. (Chinese officials insisted Rao was treated "very respectably.") At one point Arab League ambassadors were summoned and asked to endorse the Tibet crackdown "as our friends in Sudan have done." "Now we see the behavior of China as a superpower," says one ambassador who'd been called in a handful of times in as many days. "We see there's a price to be paid for those who signed all those big Chinese contracts or accepted Beijing's economic aid."

Some of this is plain clumsiness. But the regime also knows that acting tough helps it with young Chinese, whose passions are unpredictable. The information available to most members of this generation has been severely limited by censorship and sophisticated cyberpolicing. They know little about the Dalai Lama, who fled Lhasa in 1959 after the failed revolt—and thus fully believe Beijing's longtime portrayal of him as a nefarious "splittist." "A lot of Chinese don't understand why people in the West are critical of China," says Rebecca MacKinnon, a Hong Kong-based expert on China's Internet culture. "They think, 'Why are Tibetans being so ungrateful?' " When it comes to any issue involving Chinese territory, this generation of Chinese pushes the government to stand up to foreign powers and activists, to defend the country's honor.